The State of Personalization Maturity Advances Amid COVID’s Digital Awakening

During an era already marked by connectivity, McKinsey predicts COVID-19 has propelled the digitization of business and consumer interactions forward by several years. Forced to transform operations to not only meet the increased demands that followed but also keep a wave of fresh competition at bay, companies are prioritizing the customer experience at an unprecedented rate.

Given the need to quickly adapt to new and constantly changing shifts in consumer behavior, it’s no wonder personalization would become an integral part of this work. In fact, Gartner found 32% of marketing leaders expressed it was among their top three digital objectives for 2021.

To better understand the impact of this acceleration on personalization, Dynamic Yield conducted its annual maturity survey across the Americas (AMER), Europe and the Middle East (EMEA), and the Asia-Pacific (APAC) regions. This marks the fourth consecutive year publishing our research, which includes more than 450 responses from individuals in the C-Suite, Marketing, Merchandising, CX, Product, and IT.

Here’s a quick snapshot of what we found:

Our take on the findings

In a nutshell, companies that once simply valued the idea of personalization have finally started to actualize its benefits, pumping sufficient resources into the people and processes required to turn data into scalable strategies that are leaving a tangible impact on their bottom line.

As a result, we’re seeing greater levels of maturity, with the industry moving from Basic to Advanced for the first time in years. We believe this largely has to do with the acceleration brought on by COVID-19, with the stakes around digital access and engagement higher than ever before.

Dynamic Yield customers in a league of their own

Upon further investigation of the data, we found that when separating Dynamic Yield’s customer base from the rest of the market, maturity levels varied dramatically. In fact, those within our network were Advanced in seven out of the eight signals used to measure personalization maturity, whereas the majority of responses from non-customers reflected more Absent and Basic levels.

Additional takeaways exclusive to this article’s analysis include:

• 63% of Dynamic Yield customers reported having small teams that are responsible for deploying personalized campaigns for specific channels, whereas this is only true for 20% of marketers and executives from the rest of the market.

• 31% of respondents from outside of Dynamic Yield’s customer base shared being very effective in their use of data for making informed decisions across marketing initiatives, a number that jumped to 58% for our clients.

• 52% of Dynamic Yield customers cited they are able to personalize most digital interactions, with 9% of outside marketers and executives reporting the ability to do so. In fact, among this group, 43% revealed they treat all users the same.

• 41% of non-Dynamic Yield customers claimed they cannot report any personalization success stories, with 48% of our platform users able to tie their efforts to key business metrics. Further, 40% can source documented stories with big numbers, which a mere 6% of others in the industry can account for.

So what can we attribute these massive discrepancies in maturity to?

While more brands are adopting personalization amid the pandemic’s digital awakening, as a company, we understand that you don’t just plug in a technology like ours and instantly witness results. Dynamic Yield’s solutions are the means through which the right methodologies and practices can be executed – and knowing what these are and how to implement them is major service provided by our expert Customer Success Organization.

For example, our homegrown segmentation framework is helping teams mature from a merchandising mentality to one focused on customer-centricity…

“Customers have been able to develop a clear understanding of what each key audience represents, continuously learning from their behavior while also institutionalizing insights that bring them closer to their own customers and business objectives. Now the rest of the market needs to follow.” – Ben Malki, Director of Customer Success at Dynamic Yield.

In fact, after implementing Dynamic Yield’s scalable macro segmentation framework for personalization, Build with Ferguson was able to drive a 89% boost in purchases from our recommendations. And this is just one success story of many being generated by our clients every day.

Keeping a foot on the gas pedal of maturity

While we’ve seen some major movements in maturity over the last year, there’s still so much opportunity for brands to improve their efforts across a number of areas. Make sure to read the full report to learn more about how you can continue to climb the personalization maturity ladder. And don’t forget to discover your own company’s personalization maturity level by answering these 16 questions.